Spiriting Prayer Into School

Politicians may bicker about bringing back prayer, but in fact it's already a major presence--thanks to the many after-school prayer clubs

By David Van Biema

(TIME, April 27) -- On an overcast afternoon, in a modest room in Minneapolis, 23
teenagers are in earnest conversation with one another--and with
the Lord. "Would you pray for my brother so that he can raise
money to go [on a preaching trip] to Mexico?" asks a young
woman. "Our church group is visiting juvenile-detention centers,
and some are scared to go," explains a boy. "Pray that God will
lay a burden on people's hearts for this."

"Pray for the food drive," says someone.

"There's one teacher goin' psycho because kids are not turning
in their homework and stuff. She's thinking of quitting, and
she's a real good teacher."

"We need to pray for all the teachers in the school who aren't
Christians," comes a voice from the back.

And they do. Clad in wristbands that read W.W.J.D. ("What Would
Jesus Do?") and T shirts that declare UPON THIS ROCK I WILL
BUILD MY CHURCH, the kids sing Christian songs, discuss
Scripture and work to memorize the week's Bible verse, John 15:
5 ("I am the vine and you are the branches"). Hours pass. As
night falls, the group enjoys one last mass hug and finally
leaves its makeshift chapel--room 133 of Patrick Henry High
School. Yes, a public high school. If you are between ages 25
and 45, your school days were not like this. In 1963 the Supreme
Court issued a landmark ruling banning compulsory prayer in
public schools. After that, any worship on school premises, let
alone a prayer club, was widely understood as forbidden. But for
the past few years, thanks to a subsequent court case, such
groups not only have been legal but have become legion.

The clubs' explosive spread coincides with a more radical but so
far less successful movement for a complete overturn of the 1963
ruling. On the federal level is the Religious Freedom amendment,
a constitutional revision proposed by House Republican Ernest
Istook of Oklahoma, which would reinstate full-scale school
prayer. It passed the Judiciary Committee, 16 to 11, last month
but will probably fare less well when the full House votes in
May. One of many local battlefields is Alabama, where last week
the state senate passed a bill mandating a daily moment of
silence--a response to a 1997 federal ruling voiding an earlier
state pro-school prayer law. Governor Fob James is expected to
sign the bill into law, triggering the inevitable church-state
court challenge.

But members of prayer clubs like the one at Patrick Henry High
aren't waiting for the conclusion of such epic struggles. They
have already brought worship back to public school campuses,
although with some state-imposed limitations. Available
statistics are approximate, but they suggest that there are
clubs in as many as 1 out of every 4 public schools in the
country. In some areas the tally is much higher: evangelicals in
Minneapolis-St. Paul claim that the vast majority of high
schools in the Twin Cities region have a Christian group. Says
Benny Proffitt, a Southern Baptist youth-club planter: "We had
no idea in the early '90s that the response would be so great.
We believe that if we are to see America's young people come to
Christ and America turn around, it's going to happen through our
schools, not our churches." Once a religious scorched-earth
zone, the schoolyard is suddenly fertile ground for both Vine
and Branches.

The turnabout culminates a quarter-century of legislative and
legal maneuvering. The 1963 Supreme Court decision and its
broad-brush enforcement by school administrators infuriated
conservative Christians, who gradually developed enough clout to
force Congress to make a change. The resulting Equal Access Act
of 1984 required any federally funded secondary school to permit
religious meetings if the schools allowed other clubs not
related to curriculum, such as public-service Key Clubs. The
crucial rule was that the prayer clubs had to be voluntary,
student-run and not convened during class time.

Early drafts of the act were specifically pro-Christian.
Ultimately, however, its argument was stated in pure
civil-libertarian terms: prayers that would be coercive if
required of all students during class are protected free speech
if they are just one more after-school activity. Nevertheless,
recalls Marc Stern, a staff lawyer with the American Jewish
Congress, "there was great fear that this would serve as the
base for very intrusive and aggressive proselytizing."
Accordingly, Stern's group and other organizations challenged
the law--only to see it sustained, 8 to 1, by the Supreme Court
in 1990. Bill Clinton apparently agreed with the court. The
President remains opposed to compulsory school prayer. But in a
July 1995 speech he announced that "nothing in the First
Amendment converts our public schools into religion-free zones
or requires all religious expression to be left at the
schoolhouse door." A month later Clinton had the Department of
Education issue a memo to public school superintendents that
appeared to expand Equal Access Act protections to include
public-address announcements of religious gatherings and
meetings at lunchtime and recess.

Evangelicals had already seized the moment. Within a year of the
1990 court decision, prayer clubs bloomed spontaneously on a
thousand high school campuses. Fast on their heels came adult
organizations dedicated to encouraging more. Proffitt's
Tennessee-based organization, First Priority, founded in 1995,
coordinates interchurch groups in 162 cities working with clubs
in 3,000 schools. The San Diego-based National Network of Youth
Ministries has launched "Challenge 2000," which pledges to bring
the Christian gospel "to every kid on every secondary campus in
every community in our nation by the year 2000." It also
promotes a phenomenon called "See You at the Pole," encouraging
Christian students countrywide to gather around their school
flagpoles on the third Wednesday of each September; last year, 3
million students participated. Adult groups provide club
handbooks, workshops for student leaders and ongoing advice.
Network of Youth Ministries leader Paul Fleischmann stresses
that the resulting clubs are "adult supported," not adult-run.
"If we went away," he says, "they'd still do it."

The club at Patrick Henry High certainly would. The group was
founded two years ago with encouragement but no specific stage
managing by local youth pastors. This afternoon its faculty
adviser, a math teacher and Evangelical Free Church member named
Sara Van Der Werf, sits silently for most of the meeting,
although she takes part in the final embrace. The club serves as
an emotional bulwark for members dealing with life at a school
where two students died last year in off-campus gunfire. Today a
club member requests prayer for "those people who got in that
big fight [this morning]." Another asks the Lord to "bless the
racial-reconciliation stuff." (Patrick Henry is multiethnic; the
prayer club is overwhelmingly white.) Just before Easter the
group experienced its first First Amendment conflict: whether it
could hang posters on all school walls like other
non-school-sponsored clubs. Patrick Henry principal Paul McMahan
eventually decreed that putting up posters is off limits to
everyone, leading to some resentment against the Christians.
Nonetheless, McMahan lauds them for "understanding the
boundaries" between church and state.

In Alabama, the new school-prayer bill attempts to skirt those
boundaries. The legislation requires "a brief period of quiet
reflection for not more than 60 seconds with the participation
of each pupil in the classroom." Although the courts have upheld
some moment-of-silence policies, civil libertarians say they
have struck down laws featuring pro-prayer supporting language
of the sort they discern in Alabama's bill. In the eyes of many
church-club planters, such fracases amount to wasted effort.
Says Doug Clark, field director of the National Network of Youth
Ministries: "Our energy is being poured into what kids can do
voluntarily and on their own. That seems to us to be where God
is working."

Reaction to the prayer clubs may depend on which besieged
minority one feels part of. In the many areas where Conservative
Christians feel looked down on, they welcome the emotional
support for their children's faith. Similarly, non-Christians in
the Bible Belt may be put off by the clubs' evangelical fervor;
members of the chess society, after all, do not inform peers
that they must push pawns or risk eternal damnation. Not
everyone shares the enthusiasm Proffitt recently expressed at a
youth rally in Niagara Falls, N.Y.: "When an awakening takes
place, we see 50, 100, 1,000, 10,000 come to Christ. Can you
imagine 100, or 300, come to Christ in your school? We want to
see our campuses come to Christ." Watchdog organizations like
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State report
cases in which such zeal has approached harassment of students
and teachers, student prayer leaders have seemed mere puppets
for adult evangelists, and activists have tried to establish
prayer clubs in elementary schools, where the description
"student-run" seems disingenuous.

Nevertheless, the Jewish committee's Stern concedes that
"there's been much less controversy than one might have expected
from the hysterical predictions we made." Americans United
director Barry Lynn notes that "in most school districts,
students are spontaneously forming clubs and acting upon their
own and not outsiders' religious agendas." A.C.L.U. lobbyist
Terri Schroeder also supports the Equal Access Act, pointing out
that the First Amendment's Free Exercise clause protecting
religious expression is as vital as its Establishment Clause,
which prohibits government from promoting a creed. The civil
libertarians' acceptance of the clubs owes something to their
use as a defense against what they consider a truly bad idea:
Istook's school-prayer amendment. Says Lynn: "Most reasonable
people say, 'If so many kids are praying legally in the public
schools now, why would you possibly want to amend the
Constitution?'"

For now, the prospects for prayer clubs seem unlimited. In fact,
the tragic shooting of eight prayer-club members last December
in West Paducah, Ky., by 14-year-old Michael Carneal provided
the cause with martyrs and produced a hero in prayer-club
president Ben Strong, who persuaded Carneal to lay down his gun.
Strong recalls that the club's daily meetings used to draw only
35 to 60 students out of Heath High School's 600. "People didn't
really look down on us, but I don't know if it was cool to be a
Christian," he says. Now 100 to 150 teens attend. Strong has
since toured three states extolling the value of Christian
clubs. "It woke a lot of kids up," he says. "That's true
everywhere I've spoken. This is a national thing."